


you're the only friend i need

by burnsides



Category: Futurama
Genre: (just one), Alcohol, Angst, Friends to Lovers, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Slurs, Trans Character, its just Sad!, no real....conclusion here folks, repressed homosexuality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-09
Updated: 2018-08-09
Packaged: 2019-06-24 12:34:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,868
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15630783
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/burnsides/pseuds/burnsides
Summary: Fry feels like the sun is in his chest, just for a moment. His face is numb from smiling. “Thanks, Bender. That -- that really means a lot.”“Whatever.”





	you're the only friend i need

**Author's Note:**

> as a warning: there is a mention of gay slurs in here. it's pretty noticeable when it comes up (it's only used twice), and it is not in direct reference to any of the characters. there's also very mild implied not quite consensual stuff, but it's more of an afterthought of fry being drunk and just kind of out of it. i didn't feel like there was enough of either to present bigger warnings (if others think so i can change the tags) but still, stay safe!  
> i like a lot of frender stories but a lot of them focus on bender being a Robot, which is good, but i wanted to do smth different in the narrative of futurama and in the experiences of characters and how they deal w being (that pic of griffin mcelroy) oh , You Know (gay)  
> also kiff is a trans lesbian. my city now

It’s late, and Fry is drunk. These are the two things Fry knows for certain, so he keeps stating them, loudly, to anyone who will listen.

“I’m drunk,” he carefully quips to Amy. She nods and nods, and giggles a little, and nods. “You’re nice,” is what he manages again, and she barks out a laugh.

“I’m gay, Fry!” she says like she’s throwing a party.

“I know,” Fry says, maybe once or twice. “‘M not flirting. How’s the girlfriend?”

“Kif? She’s a delight.” Every sentence Amy says is punctuated with a giggle. It’s funny, so Fry laughs, too, which makes Amy laugh, until they’re both snorting and coughing.

“Stop embarrassing yourselves, you two,” chides the deep voice of the woman behind them, who Fry recollects gleefully as Leela.

“Leelah!” he yells. “My friend Leelah!”

“That’s me,” she remarks, scooting away from him (he didn’t realized he had moved). Her hair was done up very nicely, and her combat boots went kind of well with her odd choice of a nice, fashionable dress to a club. She looked annoyed, which was normal, and also decidedly not drunk.

“That’s because I’m not,” she replies, to the loud thought Fry had apparently just openly voiced. “At least one of us has to be sober to deal with the other ones.”

“Bender can handle us,” Fry says, then laughs at the thing he said, because it was false. “He can’t even get drunk!”

“He would lead you all off like a Buggalo herder on Mars,” Leela muttered as she twirls one of the little umbrellas in her drink. “He lives for making misery for every one of us.”

“Why don’t you like him?” Fry asks, tilting his head and feeling like a sloshing ocean in his head just leaned slightly to the right.

“I like Bender,” Leela says, but she’s not looking at him.

Fry tuts. “Even when we used to date, you hated his guts. Why is that?”

“I said a lot of things when we were dating,” she says, and maybe the words are barbed, and in another day this would hurt Fry, but it’s late and Fry is drunk, so he just laughs.

“I’m not mad that you’re a lesbian, Leela,” he says, and laughs again because they start with the same letter, and there’s a word for that, he thinks.

“Neither am I,” answers Leela, after a moment. “I’m just saying things were different then.”

Fry nods and nods like a bobblehead on a car dashboard. “It’s late,” he agrees. _Onomatopoeia? No, that’s the words that are like sounds. Like whiz and bang and stuff._

Leela straightens her back and sniffs. “Anyway, Bender is off with some fembots spending too much money. Don’t go near him or he’ll rope you into bad decisions, too. Also, I like Bender just fine.”

He failed English in ninth grade, but passed in tenth. What’s the word? He’s not sure. “I need to talk to Bender,” he manages, getting up quickly.

Leela watches him for a second, stumbling off his chair, and then speaks up. “Fry, wait.”

He turns around, and she’s just looking at him. A few months ago, this would’ve made his heart come out of his chest. But now he’s just drunk, and it’s late, and he needs to find Bender. Lesbian Leela. L-l-l-l. What was the word?

“Nevermind.” She smiles briefly. “Have fun, Fry.”

“Alliteration!” he barks. “That’s what it is!”

And he’s near Bender, but not quite next to him, not quite near enough to get his attention. Bender is surrounded by people and extraterrestrials and robots and lots and lots and lots of drinks. Fry can’t see him in the mass that has conceived around him, but his drink is refilled, so he sits on a weirdly shaped, plush couch, and waits. Bender will exit the throng at some point. It’s late, and Fry’s drunk, and he has the keys, and at some point everybody needs to go home.

In the thrumming lights and wild music, suddenly, Fry is taken aback by it all. He’s lived here for just about three and a half years, and things still take him by surprise. There's aliens, which, awesome. Also different subspecies of cows that make super good meat. Gender transition was so easy now. Gay marriage is not only legal, which is insane, but like, people are cool with it mostly? So much was solved, but there’s a lot of new problems, too. He saw two dudes making out in the back of the lobby, but someone had an anti-robot tattoo and had to be escorted away from the bar. It’s weird. He gets used to the feeling, and yet, he still feels surprised, a lot of the time.

A pretty girls sits next to him, and smiles. Fry is already smiling, so he waves his drink without comment.

“Hey there,” she says, and points to his now empty (when did that happen?) glass. “Can I refill that for you?”

 _I’m drunk,_ is what Fry thinks, but only half shrugs come out of his body, which the girl must take as a yes because there’s a drink in his hand.

“It’s late,” Fry comments, going back to a regular track of mind for him right now. “Shouldn’t you be going home soon?”

“Are you making an offer?” she purrs, but only a little, and maybe it’s playful, so it’s okay.

“Are you drunk?” he yells over the growing noise, Christ, when did it get so _loud?_

The girls rolls her yellow eyes. They match the color of her straight, bobbed hair, and her tan skin is a contrast to the neon blue of her dress. If she isn’t drunk, she’s certainly very bright looking. “Schpleez,” she scoffs. “I’m fine. I’ll make it home okay. You just gotta learn to let that stuff go.”

Fry wonders if he missed parts of the conversation, if the alcohol ate them away like acid, bubbling and hissing away. She’s awfully close, nearly on his own cushion now, and Fry is too sense numbed to wonder if he should like this or not. “I had like twenty shots,” he says. “I did let go.”

“Not enough,” she says, in a weird tone of voice. Fry ponders why these things always seem completely out of his control. This is his life, right? Didn’t he know what was going on? Then why did these things happen? Getting frozen in a chamber until the future, getting trapped in multiple jails in multiple planets, getting lost on the moon, somehow burning his Toaster Strudel every single goddamn time he made it. He thinks about this as the girl is kissing him, wetly and weirdly, with her hands on his chest. Did he say something to make something happen? 

_Shit just happens sometimes,_ Fry thinks, and is startled by the shattering sound of glass. He pulls away from the wet kiss with a pop and hears Bender's voice in the throng of chaos. “Bender,” he manages, and stumbles to his feet.

“Heeey,” whines the girl, but Fry can’t deal with that because Bender is yelling something way too loud and it sounds like _you ugly bastard, useless pile of bolts, I’ll fucking kill you, I’ll kick your ass._ The music is unbearably loud, now, or maybe that’s the yelling, the crunch of glass under feet, the sound of Bender’s voice. He’s in the middle of it all (God, when isn’t he), mashed with some bot that’s, surprisingly, much smaller than him.

“Bender,” is what Fry yells out, even though what he wants to say is that he wants to go home, and that some girl was kissing him, and it seemed okay at first but now it really, really doesn’t feel like it was. Bender stops punching the smaller bot, and he won’t look at Fry, but he moves towards him backwards.

“Don’t you ever fucking say that again,” hollers Bender to the sputtering bot on the ground. Fry feels for his arms, takes him and drags him, nearly dropping him after tripping over a fallen over cushion. He can’t see the girl, or Amy or Leela, or anyone else who came with him; it feels like a bunch of indistinguishable blurs, fuzzy and colorful and bright. He’s suddenly aware of the mass of people in the bar, and all the sweat and spit, and his sticky hands, and his head feels like something was being drilled into it, and he ---

\--- he can feel the lipstick on his face ---

“...not blacking out on me, meatbag, not after dragging me out right as things were getting good --”

Fry is on the concrete. The air is so quiet it’s stifling, and for a terrifying second Fry thinks he’s deaf, until he registers Bender’s voice.

“--get your ass up, can’t believe y--”

“Stop yelling,” Fry whines, pressing his fingers to his temples, because no matter how much he wants to find Bender, the ringing in his ears his voice causes will not help in this search.

“There you are!” Bender is standing above him, street lamp behind his head, so he can’t make out his face. “What the hell were you thinking, idiot?”

“You were yelling,” Fry says.

“You made me look like an idiot, idiot!” Bender barks. Fry thinks of how he repeats things when he’s scared or frustrated or sad. He tries to connect the thoughts to whatever is happening, or what it means, or what any of it means, in the grand scheme of things. He can’t do it.

“I don’t care why you were doing, whatever,” he says, sitting up. “Can we just go home now?”

“Fine,” Bender snaps. “Fine, fine, fine. But if you do that again, I’m going to use your stupid body as a battering ram the next time I want to break into a building.”

Fry temporarily forgets how to use his legs, so Bender helps him up, a heavy, metallic arm around his shoulder, and they waddle out of the block they’re on.

“Where are we going?” he asks.

“We’re taking a shortcut,” Bender answers. “Avoidin’ the cops.”

“Can we stop by a sev-elev’?”

He shoots Fry a look. “A what? Are you trying to make a dirty joke in binary code or something? Because that’s not how that works.”

“For pain meds,” Fry starts, and then stops, because 7-11 stopped being a thing years ago. Other corporate giants took it down. “Nevermind.”

The night air makes his head quiet down, in the end. It’s much cooler, and emptier, the buildings in the dark making everything look like a jungle, with wide trees and cinder block shrubbery. With only Bender around, everything feels a little more in place. The clunk of their awkward footing, Fry’s heavy breathing. It feels like a mix of everything old and new and good.

“No matter what year I’m in, three AM city walks are always the same,” Fry says. “Same yesterday as it is today.”

Bender doesn’t say anything. Fry temporarily wonders if the barfight has rendered him deaf. He means to ask like a normal person, but instead, his hand raps the metal head of his friend. “Are your ears awake?” he manages. 

“What? Yes. Stop.” 

“What’s wrong?” Fry asks, petulant, like a little kid. He can walk now, but Bender hasn’t moved, so neither will he.

“What makes you think something’s wrong?” he snaps. “I just had the night of a lifetime -- partying, drinking, some good old fashioned bar fights. This is living, baby! How could anything be wrong!”

If Fry can listen hard enough, he can hear crickets. Bugs rarely went extinct, even after hundreds of years, and you can still hear them now. He thinks about how crickets probably sound the same as they did thousands of years ago, back when dinosaurs were around and shit. It’s like listening into a seashell to hear the ocean.

“One of them called a human couple a bunch of faggots,” says Bender, as quiet as his voice box goes.

“What?”

“You heard me. This bot saw these two dudes with their arms around each other, leaning on one another, whatever, and he starts yelling stuff at them. Called them faggots who deserved to rot.”

Like crickets. Some things don’t change.

“That blows,” is what Fry says. “I thought that was over.”

“Freaks’ll find ways to be freaks, you know. Just because it’s a lot better now doesn’t mean everybody likes it.”

"I like it."

It hangs there for a moment, like a butterfly not quite pinned to the wall, fluttering. Not alive and not dead, but somewhere in between, stagnated between the two.

“I’m transgender,” is what Fry clarifies, not so much on purpose as an accident of his mouth.

“Oh, shit,” is how Bender responds.

“The transition was so easy,” he says. “You don’t even gotta take shots anymore, you can swallow pills. I got surgery first week here. It was awesome.”

Crickets, and crickets. Some things don’t change, and Fry is pinned there. For the first time that night, he feels very afraid.

“Nevermind,” he says, and it feels like his organs are shutting down, and maybe it’s just from the alcohol, and maybe it’s not. “That was -- just -- just a joke. I’m not -- I’m not like --”

“Fry, shut up,” Bender cuts him off. “That’s great. That’s seriously great. I just, didn’t know so I was surprised, is all.”

“You were?”

“Yeah. You transitioned really well, meatbag.”

Fry feels like the sun is in his chest, just for a moment. His face is numb from smiling. “Thanks, Bender. That -- that really means a lot.”

“Whatever.”

It feels like the walk has been going on years, like they’ve been circling the streets over and over. Fry doesn’t mind though. The night’s nice, and the city lights feel distant, and Bender’s here, so everything is okay. The drunkenness has settled over Fry like a pleasant fog.

A thought sudden;y connects, like a thousand puzzle pieces to make a puzzle that was so obvious he wanted to kick himself for not noticing. He stumbles forward, then surges back, holding onto the glimmer of an idea like a lifeline. “Bender, are you gay?”

“What?” Bender sputters, rearing backwards like the question took physical form to push him. “Fry, w-- I -- what the fuck?”

“Are you?”

“No! No, I don’t -- I sleep with fembots from here to fuckin’ Saturn! No, I’m not -- I’m not gay!”

“Oh,” Fry mumbles. The thought is gone, and Fry wonders if it even made sense in the first place. Coherency takes too much effort right now.

There’s a beat of silence before Bender whispers, “Are you?”

“Hm?”

“Are you gay?” Bender’s voice box sounds like it’s being strangled, like the words are being yanked from his throats.

And Fry thinks. His dad had always talked about hating those stupid pansy’s, and that if any of his kids even affiliated with thta sort, he’d rip them a new one. There was never an option to think about it, because being gay was bad. But now, when the option is here, and his dad and everybody else he knew are dead in the ground, guilt pools in his stomach. He thinks that if someone was nice, he wouldn’t mind kissing them no matter what gender they were, and that was probably just as bad.

“I don’t know,” he admits, trying to be quiet. “I guess I never really thought about it.”

“Well, if you had to date a guy, then. Who would it be?”

Fry doesn’t even have to think about it. The answer comes right out. “You, obviously.”

It’s only quiet for a minute, until panicked, forced laughter spills from Bender’s mouth. “Haha, wow, shit, Fry! A robosexual on top of being some grandpa from the past! You that eager to jump into some new species’ pants?”

The hurt from that comment just doesn’t come to Fry, and he turns his head and looks at Bender. He’s shaking, shaking hard, the lines of his teeth chattering and clenching. His arm is still around Fry, but only halfway, stuck in between something.

“Hey,” says Fry. “Hey, it’s okay.”

“It’s _not._ ” Bender stumbles forward, stepping into their apartment (when did they get here? What time was it?).

“Hey,” Fry says again. _'Hey' is for horses. Speak up, girl,_ says his father’s voice in his head. “Bender.”

“What?” Bender snaps. Fry used to be so scared when he first came here. Bender would yell and he would cower, waiting to be hit harder than anything he’d ever felt in his life, missy, if I ever catch you sneakin’ around in those fuckin’ clothes again. But the blows like that never come. So Fry stopped being scared.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

Bender laughs, but his voice is warbled and scared. “You should be! What the hell are you doing? What are you _doing_ to me?”

Fry lets the tide of the conversation go in. He says nothing.

“Since the day you came here, all you did was change things. Your stupid self is from a thousand years ago, but you still romp around, acting so hunky dory and happy, and learning new shit, and you take to everything so well! How do you fucking do it?!”

“I don’t,” he whispers. He’s close enough for Bender to be able to hear him. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I think about things that happened thousands of years ago all the time.”

Bender shakes his head over and over. “Everything’s different because of you,” he sobs. “Why can’t I make you go _away?_ ”

Fry hugs him, clumsily. His tongue is lead in his mouth, at least for the moment, but he reaches through the fog, anyway, for Bender. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Stop being so nice to me.”

“I like being nice to you.” _I like you,_ Fry’s brain presents, but it doesn’t quite make it to his mouth. He watched the informational videos, he’s seen the protests, the comments. He’s not supposed to like any robot, and certainly not Bender, because he’s a man. He didn’t really think about dating robots, but if he had to date Bender, he didn’t think he’d mind, and that was probably just as bad.

“You’re drunk,” Bender whispers. His voice is softer than he’s ever heard it, and Fry feels like it’s breaking his heart.

“I’m not trying to make you sad.”

“You do.” Bender’s hands are on top of his, tracing the line from his thumb to his wrist. “You make me so goddamn sad, Fry.”

“Do you want me to go away?”

“Not ever, idiot.”

It’s foggy, and he can’t quite feel his face, but he can feel Bender, and that’s the next best thing. He kisses the side of his face, cold and hard and metal, and he’s not a quite a man and it doesn’t feel like he’s all robot, not with how drunk he is, and how warm his own hands are. It’s in between, somewhere in the middle. _This doesn’t count,_ he thinks, kissing the place where his forehead would be. _This doesn’t count, because it’s just Bender. This is a freebie._ He kisses next to his eye, and Bender makes a guttural noise in his throat. 

“You’re so soft,” Bender whispers, like a secret. Their hands are tangled in a mass of metal and skin. He’s still shaking so hard. Fry wants nothing more than to stop it, to hold him close to let whatever made him act like this stop. Fry kisses where his mouth would be, and it’s not quite as awkward as he imagined. It just feels like Bender, and Bender isn’t awkward. He’s just Bender.

Fry keeps kissing parts of his head, clumsy hands cupping the side of his face, leaving fingerprints everywhere. _Fry-prints,_ he thinks, and he laughs.

“We can’t do this,” says Bender, and it’s laughable. Bender saying they can’t do something. And anyway, his mouth at his jawline and his arms around his waist, it seems like they’re doing it anyway.

In all the videos, it ends up with the robot and the human having sex, and it’s weird and steamy and sensual, and then the human dies or something, condemned to a life of pain and sin. But they’re not doing any of that. All that Fry has off are his shoes, and he’s in Bender’s lap but nothing is even happening, just them touching each other. Fry could kiss the junction at his jaw and neck forever.

He doesn’t know how long it’s been. He’s tired, but he can’t stop whatever is happening, because he needs every second of whatever this is. This is the future, and his dad isn’t here except in his head, and it doesn’t count. It’s just Bender, and Bender, and Bender.

He touched the side of Bender’s face. “Don’t be sad.” His words are slurring together. “Be angry with me, or make fun of me. Don’t be sad.”

“You keep making me think about things I don’t want to think about,” Bender manages. “I can’t feel like this. Neither can you.”

“This doesn’t count,” Fry says before he kisses him again. Bender threads fingers through his hair, the metal cool on his scalp, but he still shakes and shakes and shakes. 

“You’re the nicest thing that ever happened to me,” says Bender.

The world is spinning, but Fry can’t tell from what. Words are trapped in his throat. Nothing feels neither here nor there, in the endless city, the dark apartment, in Bender’s arms. _Nothing really happened,_ he thinks. _So it’s not bad._ He drags Bender down next to him on the couch with little resistance from the robot.

 _We can just forget this ever happened,_ Fry almost says. This is a temporary thing. It’s not real. But saying it aloud like that solidifies it, makes the fact that they are next to each other real, and it makes Fry feel so sad. He touches Bender’s chest, right where his heart would be if he had one, and he thinks he could spend forever like this, in between a big Something. He’d give Bender his own heart if he asked for it, but he doesn’t, so he doesn’t.

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Leelah fills him in on the details. Bender got in a bar fight, they went home, Fry passed out on the couch. Amy hit her head, but she’s fine and so is Kiff. He laughs at himself through his pounding headache. Never challenge Fry to a drinking contest again, because man, he got _wasted!_ He makes a public apology to any of the people he accidentally said stupid things to.

When he gets to the break room, Bender is on the couch. Fry greets him and flops down besides him, rubbing his temples. He asks if he did anything weird last night, and Bender says nah, not any weirder than usual, and says he’s turning on All My Circuits, and Fry shrugs and says sure. One of the special guests is a pretty brunette, and Fry feels like she should be attractive to him, so he guesses she is. They finish the show like that; in comfortable silence and two feet apart.

**Author's Note:**

> twitter is mlmmagnus


End file.
